The Facebook Fatwa

A top Egyptian cleric has decreed that Farmville is bad, Super Poking is so anti-Sharia, status updates are for sinners, and, well, the land of all these apps and more, Facebook, is fatwa-worthy. More:

"Statistics show that divorce rates have risen since the advent of Facebook and it has sharply increased marital infidelity, Sheikh Abdel Hamid al-Atras said.

'It's an instrument that destroys the family because it encourages spouses to have relations with other people which break Islamic sharia law,' said al-Atrash, quoted by pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

He is the former head of the fatwa commission at Cairo's Al-Azhar University.

'While one or other of the spouses is at work, the other is chatting online with someone else, wasting their time and flouting the Sharia. This endangers the Muslim family,' said al-Atrash.

The edict followed the publication earlier this week of a study claiming one out of five of divorces in Egypt had been caused by liaisons begun on Facebook or other social networking sites."

Al-Atrash added that "whoever uses such websites must be considered a sinner."

Ah, but he has a challenger, reports Al-Arabiya:

"Former al-Azhar scholar Dr. Farahat al-Mungi argued that while Facebook might be the source of many divorces, its role in building marriages cannot be overlooked.

'I personally have witnessed several marriages that took place between people who got to know each other via Facebook,' he told Al Arabiya Saturday. 'Facebook is the source of many successful marriages and happy families.'

When asked about the views of many religious scholars towards social networking websites as against the teachings of Islam, Moungi replied that those who issue such fatwas on social-networking websites have very little knowledge about how they work or what they are about.

'The fatwas that ban those websites are in contradiction with a saying by prophet Mohamed which states that Muslims should be aware of their reality.'"

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